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Saturday, June 1, 2013

Samsung Electronics has chosen an Intel processor to power a new version of one of its top-tier Android tablets, a source with knowledge of the plans told Reuters, in a major victory for the US chipmaker, which is struggling to find its footing in the mobile market.

Samsung has chosen Intel's Clover Trail+ mobile chip for at least one version of its Galaxy Tab 3 10.1, which competes with Apple's iPad, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity because the specifications have not been announced.

Facebook , owner of the world's most popular social network, is facing increased competition for younger users from services run by Twitter and Tumblr, according to Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

While more teens are turning to rival social networks , Facebook usage is still growing among that demographic , Sandberg said on Wednesday in an onstage interview at the D: All Things Digital conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California . "Teenagers are using other things more," Sandberg said. "At the same time, they continue to be very active, engaged Facebook users."

Companies from Silicon Valley to Detroit to Germany are developing cars that park, steer and even drive themselves. Now the federal agency for traffic safety has said it wants to come along for the ride.

The Department of Transportation made its first formal policy statement on autonomous vehicles. In a nonbinding recommendation to the states, it said that driverless cars should not yet be allowed, except for testing. It said, however, that semiautonomous features, such as cars that keep themselves centered in lanes and adjust their speed based on the location of the car ahead, could save lives.

Private equity giants Carlyle Group and Blackstone Group as well as Indian outsourcers L&T Infotech and Tech Mahindra, are lining up bids for Hewlett-Packard's $1 billion stake in MphasiS, several sources involved in the process said.

Buyout firms Advent International and Bain Capital are also in talks to bid for HP's 60.5% stake in MphasiS, an IT services exporter, said the sources, who declined to be named as details of a potential deal are not yet public.

Google is adding the recently released HTC One to its lineup of smartphones running on an unmodified version of its latest Android software.

An HTC One model relying on the same version of Android as Google's Nexus brand will go on sale on June 26 for $599. That's the same day Google will start selling a Samsung Galaxy S4 that runs on a pure version of Android for $649.

Most consumers have been paying about $200 for the HTC One and Galaxy S4 since their April release. Wireless carriers subsidize the smartphones in return for a two-year contract commitment.

A study has shown that Facebook's 'mutual friends' feature may create security risks and privacy issues.

Often admired for bringing people together, the mutual friends feature on Facebook actually creates myriad security risks and privacy concerns, according to a University of Pittsburgh study published in the journal Computers and Security.

The study findings show that even though users can tailor their privacy settings, hackers can still find private information through mutual friends features, reports Science Daily.

By July, fifteen categories of electronic and IT products would be barred from selling in the Indian market if they fail to meet the safety standards set by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS). This will apply to both goods manufactured in the country as well as imported goods. The products list includes laptops, tablets, notebooks, plasma/LCD/LED televisions, optical disc players, set top boxes, microwave ovens, scanners and printers among others.

At a time when software major Infosys is under fire from investors and shareholders, the company's board has kicked off an exercise to identify the next CEO, according to sources familiar with the development.

For the first time, the board may also rope in a search firm which will help short-list external candidates, which means external candidates will get as good a chance as the internal ones in the company, according to a source. The list of internal candidates include BG Srinivas, Ashok Vemuri and V Balakrishnan, who are already on the company's board.

Equal monthly installments and cash back schemes have worked wonders for Apple in India as iPhone's monthly sales have risen by 300% to 400% over the last few months. The Cupertino-based company has managed to dramatically push up its sales by figuring out trends of consumer demand and changing the iPhone's perception from being a high-end product to an affordable one.

Compared to average monthly sales of 70,000-80,000 smartphones before the EMI schemes were offered to consumers in India iPhone sales have zoomed up to stratospheric levels, analysts at Credit Suisse said. "From our channel checks we believe that iPhone sales are nearing 400,000 units per month in India - that is nearly 3% share of handset sales for a single top-end product in a market that has long been dominated by low-end feature phones," Credit Suisse's research analyst Sunil Tirumalai said in a note to clients that was accessed by ET.

Schools, which not too long ago barred students from bringing smartphones into campuses, have made a U-turn with some of the better-known ones in the country allowing gadgets such as tablets in the classroom.

What schools like Delhi Public School or Dehradun's Doon School are doing is not much different from the emerging concept of 'Bring Your Own Device' or BYOD, a raging debate among corporations. Unlike the enterprises, which are still debating the pros and cons of BYOD, the educational institutions are encouraging students to bring laptops, tablets and smartphones into classrooms.

'Writing a bug-free C# code to develop an app' might sound distressing to many, but Pratik Mohapatra, 15, excels in the art. Born in a generation of touch screens and social media, the teenager has developed a number of major ideas, some of them finding space on Microsoft's app store as well.

The latest by the 10th grader from National Public School, Koramangala, is 'Calculator Hub' - an app with a combination of six calculators on one screen.

"This app gives a variety of options to the user, that too on the same screen of the phone. It includes a BMI Calculator with two options, and you just have to swipe to change, a temperature conversion calculator, a scientific calculator, an age calculator and calculators for simple interest and compound interest. This app was published by Microsoft very recently," Pratik explains.

Friday, May 31, 2013

In a post on the Windows Blog, Microsoft listed out various new features that will be part of an update for the Windows 8 OS.

Dubbed Windows 8.1, this free update due later this year through the Windows Store, will introduce a feature akin to the Start button in the desktop mode and even improve the search feature, among other betterments.

What started as a phenomenon on a more personal level is now extending its reach to work and offices. Organisations started by using social media as a recruiting tool. But now companies are realising the importance of social media for internal communication as well. After all, the concept of 'Employee Branding' is catching up like fire in the age where people don't hesitate to express themselves.

"Many organisations are known to use social media strategies to reach out to customers and peers quite successfully. Now, communication professionals are realising that this tool can be used effectively to reach out to internal audience as well," says Sunil Goel, managing director, GlobalHunt.

Vladimir Evtoushenkov is co-founder and chairman of Sistema, the $34 billion Russian conglomerate, which is the majority shareholder in mobile telecom firm Sistema Shyam. The Indian venture has managed to win back nine of the 21 licences that it had lost due to the Supreme Court ruling last year. Although it is looking to invest in new sectors such as retail and power, Evtoushenkov says future investments will depend on how quickly the government deals with some of Sistema concerns in telecom. Excerpts:

Google's wearable technology Google Glass, which has been gaining a lot of uncertainty about its usage and subsequent abuse related to privacy concerns, did not find a clear admirer in Apple's CEO Tim Cook.

Cook, while addressing a conference, said that the product by Google is not only difficult in terms of wearing the technology on the face but also acquiring it for $1,500, reports CNN.

India's top security brass has claimed that the Obama administration came up with an executive order that resembles India's cybersecurity initiatives after it had failed to get the Cyber Security Bill approved in the US Senate.

A confidential document circulated by National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) — the apex agency looking into the country's political, economic, energy and strategic security concerns — to the chiefs of the Indian Army, Navy and Air Force said that the Executive Order issued by the US President on February 12, this year 'in many respects mirrors the initiatives taken by India in it's document on framework of cybersecurity.'

Google on Wednesday announced a new inbox for Gmail, the company's email service used by over 400 million people worldwide. In a post on its official blog the company said that the new inbox would help users sort their emails better and focus on the communication that mattered to them.

The new inbox, which will be rolled out to users in the coming weeks, will sort mails under five different tabs by default. The primary tab, which will be visible to the user when he logs into Gmail, will be for the genuine and important communication. Email notifications sent by social media sites will automatically go under the Social tab and emails sent by e-commerce sites like eBayor Amazon will go under the Promotions tab. The two others tabs deal with confirmation emails and messages from mailing lists.

The percentage of flexi hires in the IT sector is expected to double to 20% by 2020 as IT companies increasingly outsource non-core activities and focus on high-margin businesses, said a report by the flexi staffing body Indian Staffing Federation (ISF).

"IT firms are swiftly adopting the practice of hiring flexi staff in order to beat margin pressures, maintain lean benches and also facilitate just-in-time hiring in a highly volatile market. Keeping the current situation in mind, we are expecting more and more IT companies to adopt staffing as the preferred means to man their projects," said K Pandia Rajan, president of the ISF. The flexi staffing industry in the IT sector touched $950 million last year, growing 15% in each of the last three years.

After computers, Apple is now eyeing to take the TV market by storm following a hint by CEO Tim Cook who said that the company maintains 'a very grand vision' of improving the already experimented Apple TV.

Cook said that the television experience today is just the same as it was 10 to 20 years before and nothing has changed much to make people love the experience.

Cellphone pioneer Motorola announced Wednesday that it's opening a Texas manufacturing facility that will create 2,000 jobs and produce its new flagship device, Moto X, the first smartphone ever assembled in the US.

The company has already begun hiring for the Fort Worth plant. The site was most recently unoccupied but was once used by fellow phone manufacturer Nokia, meaning it was designed to produce mobile devices, said Will Moss, a spokesman for Motorola Mobility, which is owned by Google.

Social networking giant Facebook today announced that it has started a new feature that allows users to identify official pages and profiles of celebrities, brands, journalists, businesses etc. Microblogging website Twitter already has this feature, called Verified Accounts.

As part of this initiative, Facebook will add a Verification Badge to the profile/page in question, so that users are assured of authenticity. The company said, "There is no action required for Page admins to add a verification badge. In the coming days, we will automatically verify the largest Pages on Facebook that are at the greatest risk of duplication. At this time we cannot accept verification requests for all Pages."

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Cisco Systems, the world's leading network equipment maker, will try to convince Europe's second highest court on Wednesday that it should overturn the EU's approval of Microsoft's purchase of Skype.

If Cisco wins the challenge at the Luxembourg-based general court, the European Commission would have to annul its decision, which allowed Microsoft to buy the internet video and voice company without having to make any concessions.

-- TomTom’s new map update provides coverage for over 7200+ cities and towns across India

-- New navigation software will power all TomTom VIA series products for better navigation experience

-- For faster map downloads enhanced MyTomTom application

TomTom India today announced new map update, software enhancement and up gradation to its MyTomTom application for faster map downloads. With the new map update, the coverage now expands to more than 7200+ cities and towns across India. This helps our consumers abreast with the rapid changes in the Indian land routes. The new navigation software incorporates all the key navigation logic and every element has been enhanced to deliver an improved user experience including Points of Interest (POI) stepper, Advanced Lane Guidance with split screen, modified address search functionality, device boot up during Ignition On, Improved Zoom In/Out, Interface changes, Improved display with font size & line result display changes.

Apple chief executive Tim Cook said that he expects the iPhone and iPad maker would be responsible for "several more gamechangers" and that wearable computers could be the next big thing.

"It's an area where it's ripe for exploration," Cook told an All Things Digital conference, an annual gathering of technology and media executives in the California coastal resort town of Rancho Palos Verdes.

US prosecutors have filed an indictment against the operators of digital currency exchange Liberty Reserve, accusing the Costa Rica-based company of helping criminals around the world launder more than $6 billion in illicit funds linked to everything from child pornography to software for hacking into banks.

The indictment unsealed on Tuesday said Liberty Reserve had more than a million users worldwide, including at least 200,000 in the United States, and virtually all of its business was related to suspected criminal activity.

US Attorney Preet Bharara called the case perhaps "the largest international money laundering case ever brought by the United States."

Planning to buy a Samsung Galaxy S4? Here's good news for you, the device has recently received an official price cut in the Indian market, barely a month after its launch.

The phone, which launched in India on the day of its global launch at a price tag of Rs 41,500, is now selling at Rs 40,300 on Samsung India e-store. This translates to a discount of Rs 1,200. The company is also offering a 12-month EMI option for the device.

Ryuta Kawashima is used to children pointing at him on the street. They often shout "Kawashima Devil!" It's the price the neuroscientist pays for being the famous face of a lucrative series of brain puzzles that he developed for Nintendo.

Kawashima appears in the videos as a disembodied, floating head with horns and a bright red face, asking "devilishly" hard maths and memory questions. Millions of games have been sold, earning him royalties of over $30m. But, he says, his games are more than just a fun way to learn: they could, in fact, provide a revolutionary new way to treat dementia.

When The Internship, a comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, hits movie theaters on June 7, Google will be taking more than a little interest in how the film is received.

In an unusual collaboration, the internet giant was closely involved with the film, a $58 million Fox production which features two middle-aged watch salesmen who are determined to get a job at Google.

The telecom department (DoT) is likely to ask Wipro to set up a state-of-the-art lab in India to test network gear used by mobile phone companies as it has failed to reach an agreement on the proposed funding model withTech Mahindra, which had earlier evinced an interest to set up such a lab, executives aware of the matter told ET.

Senior executives of Wipro's telecom business unit recently made a presentation to Ram Narain, who heads DoT's security wing, regarding the company's telecom devices testing facility in Bangalore. Wipro officials are learnt to have informed the telecom department that the company tests network equipment and devices for global telecom clients and also explored ways to make the test lab venture "a viable business case".

Wipro is learnt to have also communicated to DoT that the minimum cost of setting up such a test lab would be $50-$100 million ( 275- 550 crore).

McAfee introduced two new suites: McAfee Complete Endpoint Protection – Enterprise, and McAfee Complete Endpoint Protection – Business. These suites are the first to link security from chip to OS to applications, protecting against new threat vectors and bringing critical visibility to risk management. The suites are the first to include McAfee Deep Defender, a rootkit protection based on hardware-enhanced security jointly developed by Intel and McAfee, dynamic whitelisting, risk intelligence, and real-time security management. By including mobile device management and support for Macs and Linux, McAfee suites help businesses of all sizes protect devices, data and applications.

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Sony is best known as a consumer electronics company, making PlayStation game consoles and televisions. And it loses money on almost every gadget it sells.

Sony has made money making Hollywood movies and selling music. That profitable part of the business is what Daniel S Loeb, an American investor and manager of the hedge fund Third Point, wants Sony to spin off to raise cash to resuscitate its electronics business.

Telecom operatorBharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) andDimension Data, a global ICT solutions and services provider, today jointly announced the launch of their enterprise cloud services in India. Based on Dimension Data's Managed Cloud Platform (MCP), BSNL's enterprise cloud services will be rendered via its internet datacentres. The launch was presided over by Minister for Communications and IT KapilSibal.

Based on a standardised architecture, the MCP offers enterprises the advantage of being able to support public, private and hybrid cloud models. All MCPs are enterprise-ready, offering multiple layers of security, administrative controls, highest availability SLAs, 24/7 phone support and integrated management capabilities.

The British government has revived plans to snoop into people's emails, internet accounts and mobile phone texts.

Following the recent killing of British soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich, UK's home secretary Theresa May said that thousands face risk of being radicalized by hate preachers and the charter legislation for snooping needs to be revived.

The controversial bill will involve tracking individuals' email, internet and mobile text use. The proposal has the full backing of Britain's monarch Queen Elizabeth.

The notorious and yet proficient Syrian Electronic Army, in their latest hacking spree, have targeted and defaced Sky's Androidapps.

The Syrian Electronic Army or SEA replaced the logos of six of the UK broadcaster Sky's apps with that of SEA. The hackers breached the firm's Twitter accounts and posted messages to users to view the defaced programmes.

In a report by BBC, SEA has earlier hacked social media accounts of political leaders, top organizations including BBC, FT, CBS News, Associated Press, FIFA amongst others.

QAI, the world’s leading consulting and workforce development organization recently announced its 8th Annual International Project Management Leadership Conference (PML 2013) to be held on 14th June, 2013 at Hotel Novotel Juhu Beach, Mumbai. Designed to operate as the single largest platform in the Project Management sphere, PML 2013 endeavors to bring together practitioners, thought leaders, tool vendors, product experts, gurus and senior representatives from across industries, academia and government for sharing, exchanging, learning & accelerating implementation of best practices in Project Management.

Samsung on Tuesday launched Galaxy Mega 5.8 and Galaxy Mega 6.3, its biggest smartphones so far in India. The company, encouraged by the sales of Galaxy Note, which has a screen size of 5.5-inch, believes that in the developing countries there is demand for oversized smartphones that can also double up as tablets.

As their names suggest, the new Galaxy devices have a screen size of 5.8-inch and 6.3-inch. While the smaller of the two Galaxies has an MRP of Rs 25,100, the bigger one is priced at Rs 31,490. Samsung said that Galaxy Mega 5.8 will be available in the market within a week while Galaxy Mega 6.3 will reach shops in the middle of June.

Startup Village, country's first telecom technology incubator, here is set to host from May 29 the regional round of the prestigious BizSpark India Startup Challenge held by Microsoft, an organiser said.

The event is aimed at searching for entrepreneurs with innovative ideas in cloud computing, mobile applications and Windows 8business applications.

This is the first time that Kochi has been selected as one of 10 cities to host the challenge, said an organiser.

Websites that regularly report on Singapore, including Yahoo News, will have to get a license from June 1, putting them on par with newspapers and television new outlets, in a move seen by some as a bid to rein in free-wheeling internet news.

"Online news sites that report regularly on issues relating to Singapore and have significant reach among readers here will require an individual licence," Singapore's Media Development Authority (MDA) said in a statement.

Last February, Astro Teller, director of Google's secretive research lab, Google X, went to seek approval from CEO Larry Page for an unlikely acquisition. Teller was proposing that Google buy Makani Power, a startup that develops wind turbines mounted on unmanned, fixed-wing aircraft tethered to the ground like a kite.

The start-up, Teller told Page, was seeing promising results, and, he added proudly, its prototypes had survived all recent tests intact. Page approved Google X's acquisition of Makani, which was being completed for an undisclosed amount at press time. He also had a demand. "He said we could have the budget and the people to go do this," Teller says, "but that we had to make sure to crash at least five of the devices in the near future." Google X is the factory for moonshots , those million-to-one scientific bets that require generous amounts of capital, massive leaps of faith and a willingness to break things. Google X (official spelling is Google [x]) is home to the self-driving car and Google Glass and other improbable projects.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Scientists have shown that usinghands-free cellular devices on the go could lead to a sharp increase in driving errors, says a study.

A pilot study by Yagesh Bhambhani, a professor in the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine, University of Alberta, and his graduate student Mayank Rehani, showed that drivers who talk using a hands-free cellular device made significantly more driving errors -- such as crossing the centre line, speeding and changing lanes without signalling -- compared with just driving without being attached to such devices.

The jump in errors also corresponded with a spike in heart rate and brain activity, reports Science Daily.

Scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have uncovered new hard-to-detect methods involving music, lighting or vibration that criminals may use to trigger mobile device malware.

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) presented the research at the 8th Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS) in Hangzhou, China.

"When you go to an arena or Starbucks, you don't expect the music to have a hidden message, so this is a big paradigm shift because the public sees only emails and the internet as vulnerable to malware attacks," said Ragib Hasan, assistant professor of computer and information sciences and director of the UAB SECuRE and Trustworthy (SECRET) computing lab.

British broadcaster ITV on Friday became the latest media outlet to have one of its Twitter feeds hacked by anonymous supporters of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, just days after Twitter beefed up security to prevent such attacks.

Twitter said on Wednesday that it had started rolling out an optional two-step authentication regime for its users to thwart hackers.

Many Indian companies feel social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have improved their brand equity and stakeholder engagement but such platforms distract employees at work, says a survey.

The survey by AIMA, grouping of management professionals, found that more than one-third (38 per cent) of respondents believe that social media participation has improved their brand equity as well as stakeholder engagement.

However, about 31 per cent of the respondents were sceptical about using social media for business. Besides, only 24 per cent were found to be allowing employees to use social media sites at work.

On the other hand, 56 per cent of firms surveyed believe that social networking sites distract their employees and another 37 per cent of respondents believe that it would hamper internal and external communication.

News about Google Glass is everywhere these days, and so are its critics. Some charge it only with fashion crimes. Others worry about invasion of privacy: When out on a date with a Glass wearer, you won't know if they are recording you - or Googling "seduction tips," for that matter.

Nonetheless, most agree that a smartphone-linked display and camera placed in the corner of your vision is intriguing and potentially revolutionary - and like us, they want to try it. But Glass may inadvertently disrupt a crucial cognitive capacity, with potentially dangerous consequences.

On a gray day here last week,Microsoft officials welcomed a few hundred people into a tent pitched on a soccer field at the company's headquarters. Microsoft was unveiling an appliance, the Xbox One, which takes up about as much room as a lazy house cat and is designed to be plugged into a television.

It is the latest in a generational line of Xboxes, PlayStations and Nintendos to arrive in the past quarter-century. To dedicated gamers, each generation is as relevant and real a part of the calendar as an Olympiad or a presidential election cycle. Gamers argue about which one is the best. But the previous generation has stretched on longer than those before it and segues into the next at a time when there might be a meteor in the sky.

Employers are now utilising a host of social media tools such as instant messaging and social networks to communicate with their employees, a new study has found.

The research, which was based on surveys of 290 organisations from across North America, Europe and Asia, found that more than half of the employers surveyed currently use various social media tools as part of their internal communication initiatives as a way to build community.

A large number of Asia Pacific CEOs see their organisations as fast followers in adopting business and IT-led innovation, said a report by IT advisory firm Gartner. The 2013 Gartner CEO and Senior Executive Survey found that 32% see themselves as aggressive adopters of business and IT innovation, while 31% see themselves as fast followers.

The Gartner CEO and Senior Executive Survey of more than 390 senior business leaders in organizations worldwide with annual revenue of $250 million or more was conducted between October and December 2012. Of those, 78 were from the Asia Pacific region including Japan.

Monday, May 27, 2013

The next generation of console gaming is upon us. Nintendo has already launched its Wii U, Microsoft’s Xbox One will be launching sometime later this year, and Sony has revealed several details about its PlayStation 4.

But unlike its chief competitors, Sony has decided against showing off the design of its next console. The company announced the device earlier this year, talked about its specs, but wouldn’t show what it actually looked like. And when the console was recently featured in a teaser for the upcoming E3 gaming trade show, Sony once again decided against showing off the device.

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